People are exposed to video data in many situations and aspects of everyday life. Video data can be seen on televisions, digital video disc (DVD) players, computer monitors displaying an Internet webpage, and video screens found in public places, just to name a few. Most video feeds are prepackaged and delivered to a display monitor. For example, a primetime or syndicated television show or broadcast of a sporting event is packaged by a network producer and routed through the video service provider, e.g., cable or satellite provider, to the display monitor for viewing by the audience. The packaged digital content is not edited or altered once published by the video producer. In other words, the video service provider does not add digital content to the prepackaged program.
The video service provider may interleave commercial announcements between segments of the video stream. The video producer or video service provider can also overlay information over a predetermined, fixed portion of the display monitor, typically the bottom of the screen. For example, a public service notice or breaking news can be displayed as a runner across the bottom of the display monitor. In other cases, the video producer or video service provider may overlay scores of sporting events, upcoming programming, or commercial advertisements over the bottom portion of the screen during the airing of the packaged program. However, the additional video overlays a predetermined, fixed portion of the display monitor, but is not embedded with the content of the published video stream itself. The video overlay is allocated to the predetermined, fixed portion of the display monitor and has no dependence or relation to the content of the video stream. Changing the content of the packaged program would require republication of the video stream, which can only be done by the producer.